Client notes

Evidence from passes, cellars, and marquees.

These are notes from houses that hung a System Pathpoint calendar. They mention specific orders, delays, and mix changes — not a star widget.

They sat in the kitchen office with last March's booking sheets and pointed at the Fridays we always over-ordered hake. The first wall calendar looked sparse until that Friday arrived and the fish actually matched the tickets.

Helen P., Head chef, independent dining room near Wells

Kitchen demand briefing

I wanted the cellar sheet the same week as the kitchen calendar. It arrived two days later than promised because they insisted on walking the cold room. The wait was irritating; the standing par for the guest lager was the thing that had been wrong.

Marcus T., Cellar lead, town-centre pub

Cellar and beverage allocation

Our marquee Saturdays used to empty the restaurant fridge by accident. The load sheet now shows the wedding protein and the six remaining two-tops on the same page. The brigade stopped guessing which menu owned the seabass.

Priya N., General manager, country house with functions

Banquet and marquee load

The quarterly refresh caught a new Sunday sitting we had added without telling anyone except the floor. Prep weights for gravies went up; the midweek soup batch finally went down.

Owen R., Owner-chef, two-site pub group

Quarterly forecast refresh

Country house, one Saturday in May

A hotel in the Mendips ran a 90-cover wedding in the marquee and kept the dining room open because six two-tops had booked the à la carte months earlier. The year before, the fish order had been written as if the restaurant were closed. This year the banquet load sheet showed 90 wedding mains and 12 residual restaurant covers, with a note that last May's drop-off on the wedding was four guests, not the twelve the events pack had assumed.

The brigade plated both menus from one pass. Seabass was no longer guessed. The GM's only complaint was that the load sheet used the house's own dish names, which meant reprinting the events pack they had sent us — a fair irritation, and one we now ask for in the first extract request.

Town pub, cellar after a rugby weekend

A high-street pub sent four weeks of wet sales and a par card that had not been dated since the previous landlord. The allocation pack shifted bitter pull two days after the match, matching the Monday night pour the till already knew about. Guest lager stayed overstocked until the cellar lead named two substitutes; until then we had treated rotating guests as one line, which understated the cold-room squeeze.